


Metaphor

by azure_gauze



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-16
Updated: 2012-05-16
Packaged: 2017-11-05 12:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azure_gauze/pseuds/azure_gauze
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, sometimes, he feels its residue, the hint of it lurking above him like forbidden fruit. It beckons him and for a moment he thinks he can feel the stirring of his own powers return to him. And then nothing. As if it never was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metaphor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mikkey_bones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkey_bones/gifts).



There was silence. Deep, dark, and penetrating, it had the same invocation as music, reaching its tendrils into Loki’s bones to claim him. Loki does not struggle. He knows silence. Its intimate folds so pervasive that Loki welcomes the madness it brings. It swallows him whole and permeates his mind until he starts hearing things that never were. Sometimes, he would reach out and fumble in the darkness, the silence, for the reassurance that he is still there. He has to remind himself that he still has substance, but sometimes he would forget.

Yet there is a certain reverential sanctity to it. As if Loki is some sacrificial offering to an unknown God. A holy offering for his sins, he could feel them ripping his beating heart from his body and does not struggle.

The quiet God-of-Mischief seldom spoke, but hated silence nonetheless. Loki needed his words. He needed the crowd of people speaking about their mundane lives as if it was the universe. He revelled in the little secrets they revealed in moments of ignorance. He needed to listen. Their words kept him from his thoughts. There was nothing he feared more in the Nine Realms than the thoughts that crept up into his mind, like a diseased garden, rotting, rotten. In happier times he banished them. They had long since overwhelmed him. Those same thoughts now turns him towards the bitter escape of madness. He finds certain beauty in them now, the same way one grows to love their captor. Trapped in his gilded cage, there was nothing for him to do but wait and be consumed by hatred. Boiling underneath a most vacant exterior there was a glowing anger that sustained him. With each languishing day, his anger grew. Even he knew, although he could never articulate it, that he was most angry at himself and that anger was fast turning into hatred.

(And yet Loki couldn’t hate himself. He didn’t want to. He was afraid of what he might do if he lost that one last shred of self-respect. )

He closes his eyes and tries to remember himself, but all he is left with is the silence.

-

Time passes in stuttered surges. The days meld into one. Loki has no sense of time anymore and only the silence is the consistent. He embraces it. The endless movement of magic, ebbing, pulsing, does not reach him in his dungeon.

Sometimes, sometimes, he feels its residue, the hint of it lurking above him like forbidden fruit. It beckons him, the evasive maiden, and for a moment he thinks he can feel the stirring of his own powers return to him. And then nothing. As if it never was.

He was starting to think that it was all a lie. He convinces himself of it.

-

When he hears the footsteps descending towards him, he wills his heart to stone.

Thor is there. Loki hated him. Thor is always there. Thor came to visit him every day, bringing him things, asking him to let go of his anger, to see the light. Grotesquely optimistic, Loki hated his persistence. Thor is essentially charismatic; his ability extends far beyond his wealth and extravagance but into his essential allure. If one asked an Asgardian to define charisma, they would tell you that it is to be loved by others without their expectation that you love them back. It was unrequited love by consent, singular understanding.

Thor was everything Loki despised in humanity as embodied in an Asgardian and Loki would never forgive him for it.

And Thor brings him things, plying him as a bumbling idiot would a precocious maiden. His gifts were degrading. Loki throws them right back at him, or destroys them in front of his brother, but Thor does not give up.

Loki doesn’t want him to.

-

Loki turns. He struggles against his bonds. They tighten.

The light that the opening door cast onto the dungeon floor was kaleidoscopic. They shift and morph in the air and let the room shiver into life again, breaking those spells that sealed the wooden door with careless efficiency.

The clinking of the chain stop and Loki stills. He does not give his brother the benefit of his reaction, but waits.

There is a cup in Thor’s hands. His muscled arm reaches towards him. Loki looks away but his eyes are drawn to the smooth curves of Thor’s arm, the leonine movement of Thor’s offering, and there is something bitter in his mouth. Thor was not graceful, but he a lion, a King, proud and powerful. It carried a certain elegance.

“A present.” Thor says. “For you, brother.”

Loki blinks at him, pauses, and his expression does not change. “No.”

“You’ll enjoy it, this time.”

For a moment, Loki wonders what it is. He grants his brother a look of tired interest and his eyes travel to Thor’s arm. It was coffee. Sweetened and made light, taking the bitter edge off the drink, Loki looks up.

“I’d. Rather. Drink. Poison.”

And indeed the drink turns to powder, arsenic. It glimmers in the golden light escaping the corners of the door.

Thor drops the cup in surprise and it shatters on the floor. The sound of clattering porcelain breaks the silence. It is music.

Then, a voice. “Does it please you to make me sad?”

“I am the God of Chaos. I feed off your misery.”

“But you’ve always hurt the ones you loved the most.”

Loki drives Thor away not because he doesn’t want Thor to see that he was miserable, but because he doesn’t want to see Thor’s misery.

Loki never tells Thor that he liked his coffee black.

-

His body is pinned like a moth, leaving a mark on the dust. He sprawls out on the floorboards, the cold hardwood pressed against his cheek. Loki doesn’t remember how long he has been there. The scent of ambergris and aloeswood wafted to him from the floor, and he presses his ear to the end of the planks of wood, dreaming of hearing something.

There is no sleep for him. There is no waking.

Thor had stopped coming.

It was all gone and he wishes that he would remember what it was like to have something again. Anything.

He feels the hard floor press up against his chest, his ribcage struggling to sustain breath. The light is gone. The moving shafts of gold that penetrated the dank prison were still, and they become little hints for him, tricks of Asgard to take away his mind. Death would be sweet release from this brand of madness that those who claimed loved him were inflicting upon him. He hates them all the more for it. He hates that one person that claimed to love him more than any Asgardian because he was afraid of the fact that he loved his brother back. 

For a moment he feels foolish – as if somebody was watching him. He does not try to rationalize.

When he finally pulls himself up from the floor, the layers of disturbed dust had already settled, and he wonders if the prison had tried to swallow him, had tried to let him feel something again for once in his life. He would never have done it. Now he would never leave this place.

-

Loki dreams again, and it is like old times again. He dreams of those fields of golden flowers and cool green apples in the summer. Those memories were so buried in his mind that they seemed merely an imprint. He wishes he could hold them again.

When he wakes, he is shivering, and for a moment he wishes there was light. He wishes for fire that would burn everything down. He pretends the world is on fire. It would burn away his desires, burn away his soul and he wishes the world would be sucked away by a black hole.

Then he would dream forever.

He does not sleep again.

-

When Thor returns, Loki doesn’t know how long it’s been. His throat is dry. He does not think to ask.

Thor is remorseful. He presses his lips to Loki’s ear and kisses him. Loki turns away but sees only himself. Thor has brought him a mirror. It sits like a discrepancy in the landscape, telling him the truth, truths that Loki does not want to imagine. Loki wants to smash it, but instead, it catches him.

There is nobody looking back, gone were the wry alizarin lips, the slick hair whipped by adventure, the magical glow of his cheeks. He is dead. The realization hits like Mjolnir.

For a moment he doesn’t realize that there is a figure behind him until he feels the hand in his hair.

“Why do you torture me with myself?”

Thor hesitates but the hand runs down Loki’s back, trailing the fragile spine with a sense of awe.

Loki closes his eyes and wishes the mirror would shatter.

-

When Loki is kissed, does he object? Does he turn away to hide his smile from his brother? Does he laugh? The taste of black coffee lingers in his mouth but the cup grows cold, abandoned.

Somewhere he was aware of tears. They trail down his shirt, soaking his skin. Then he looks up and catches a glimpse of his brother. The buttercups in his hair and the eyes that remind him of what a summer sky would look like, and there is the silence.

(There were times when Loki forgets his own name, and says Thor’s instead. The name is a song, but Loki is already deaf.)

He kisses him back and the kisses deepen. They are locked together and neither of them knew how.

The cup falls down, slowly, slowly, and shatters on the cold floor, a spray of shards tumble across the ground and begins to reflect the light around them.

Loki blinks. and does. Thor is so close and he is whispering. Loki catches his words like a spider, and swallows them as they linger in the air.

“I spilled your coffee. Spilt it.” He kisses his brother again, as if to taste his reality, and cringes, “I’m sorry.”

Loki stops Thor with another kiss, hot on his throat, he begs for more. The taste of coffee is gone now. Loki is left with Thor.

When it is all over and they are lying on the ground, Thor is the first to break the silence.

“I must go.”

He says that without really knowing why. Thor leaves before he really has to. He leaves for the sake of leaving.


End file.
